God Save the Queen

London. Insert every adjective you can think of here. What a place!! Classy, trashy, artsy, historical, beautiful, ugly, fast, slow, convenient, creepy, friendly, rude, memorable, breath-taking, and one hell of an Easter. For Easter holiday, my future roommate Emily and I decided to go visit our native mother-land, England. To be completely honest, the return to the English speaking world wasn't as refreshing as I thought it would be! It was actually kind of nice to go back to Germany :) BUT, I had an absolutely amazing, fantastic adventure, and I wouldn't have done it any other way! We spent 4.5 days in London, and I think I saw just everything from  royal palaces to crazy-busy markets and famous street graffiti. Expensive shops set in junk neighborhoods (I deemed these to be purposely hipster-neighborhoods), expensive shops set in expensive neighborhoods, turkish guys pushing cheap clothes, Notting Hill, surveillance cameras every 2 feet, and rubbish bins every 20000 miles (seriously, we spent so much time looking for the damn trash cans!). I spent my first five days without using ANY heat styling tools (hair dryer or straightener) on my hair, and let's just say poor London probably suffered just as much as I did. And I think by the time I arrived home on Tuesday, my feet were permanently molded into the shape of my boots! I arrived home with a hole in my boot and about a million pictures, a free London shot glass from our hostel, plus a nice tacky postcard of the Queen to send to my family. We did a bar crawl,   met a famous celebrity (Zach Braff), saw a play, went to Easter Service at Westminster Abbey, and I even saw Her Majesty's crown jewels! They say a picture's worth a thousand words, so I think I'm better off describing the trip using this picture chronology (with some explanations along the way). Enjoy

(Warning, there are quite a few photos on here. If you would like to see more, check out my Facebook photo album. Also, sorry friends who've already seen these photos on Facebook.) 

I FINALLY got some more stamps in my passport! Only a few, because the Schengen Zone makes it so easy to travel! 

My fabulous, hip, all-knowing travel buddy. What would I do without you? 

I loved the Egyptian exhibit at the British Museum. We saw the Rosetta Stone too! 

Cupcakes at a famous bakery! 

Bustling, busy Camden Town. Home to millions of markets, and some awesome bars. 

We accidentally found ourselves in China Town. And when in China Town, eat Japanese! :) 

  

Zach Braff! (Scrubs anyone?) 

I had a brief trip to Hogwarts and back.

No trip to London is complete without extensive use of The Tube. Have you ever seen a four story escalator going down? It's super reassuring. 

Welcome to Notting Hill! Is this real life? 

Portobello Road Antique Market

This market was a bit classier than the ones in Camden Town, where you could buy furry handcuffs, or platform leather boots.

Happy Easter!! Where did you go to church? Was it where the Queen was coroneted where Kate and Willy tied the knot? :) 

Oh hey Parliament! 

I've got a thing for clock towers, and this one beats them all. I think I have more photos of Big Ben than I do of my boyfriend.....

Is there a better way to spend Easter than in a park in London next to Buckingham Palace with a swan? 

I know the Queen waved to me out the window. The flag was up! 

Apparently London Bridge does NOT equal Tower Bridge. Hello Tower Bridge! Hello Rain! 

Whitehall (Tower of London)

Bankski graffiti

Vintage department store? I think yes!

We didn't buy any.....too expensive :( 

And no trip to London in freezing April is complete without POUNDS AND POUNDS spent on tea. 

Bye beautiful London...until we meet again! (and my bank account recovers from the dollars to pounds exchange rate! ) 

Dark, Dreary (&yet still Delightful) Düsseldorf

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Düsseldorf with some of my international friends. It's only an hour away from Aachen by train, and it's free for us, so we were pretty stoked to go. Bitterly cold and cloudy like always, we didn't stay for too long because we were frozen to the core. I liked Düsseldorf, because it had a really weird mixture of modern architecture and pretty old buildings. We saw a giant market, the Altstadt ("old city" where I tried Altbier, the beer made in Düsseldorf), and walked along the windy river bank until we got to the TV tower and modern edge. Across the river from the TV tower and boardwalk were some sheep just a-grazing away.It was pretty funny to see them right smack in the middle of the city. I'm going to keep this blog short and let the pictures tell the story. 

A pretty canal into the city

Old vs New

Market goods! (Those are tomatoes!!)

International Friends!! (Poland, Spain, Columbia, Czech, and America) 

Hauptbahnhof = Main train station

And while I was freezing in Düsseldorf, Aachen was bursting into Spring!! I came home to this!

A Stop in Die Eifel: Monschau

Last Sunday it was bitterly cold, rainy, grey, and an all around sort of miserable. So guess what that meant? ALL DAY TRIP OUTSIDE. I am such a smart cookie. 


It was the last day of my vacation before real school started, and so I decided I would take Jessica on a short trip to the village of Monschau, based on several recommendations that it was a quaint little place. Monschau is located in the (sort of) National Park called die Eifel. Apparently, in the summer, it's quite the happenin' place for hiking and other outdoorsy activities. Besides, on Sundays in Aachen, everything is always closed, so we might as well go somewhere. We met my Polish friend Kamila at the bus station, and the three of us headed out.


It was about an hour trip by bus to Monschau, and I'm sure the countryside flashing past the window would've been beautiful had I not instantly fallen asleep. I don't know what it is about public transportation, but it works better than Lunesta. The grey weather may or may not have contributed to it as well...


When we got to Monschau, our first thoughts were sort of along the lines of, "What the (insert choice word here)?"  It was a tiny, tiny place. And because it was nestled in a valley, and we were perched at the top corner, we couldn't see hardly any of it. But, hey, we had gotten all the way there, so we had to go check it out. Walking a little ways, we heard water rushing, and it turned out there was a river running through the middle of the town. Walking a little farther down the path, the town opened up before us, and we realized we were possibly in the cutest place on Earth. Before exploring, we decided to take a  hiking trail up to the top to look out over the village. There was an old ruin, but we couldn't understand the German plaque.

 

 The woods were really pretty, and from the ruin, we could look out over the village and see that we had made no mistake in coming to Monschau. 

There was another lookout point on the other side of the city, and so we eventually made our way through the town, and hiked up to it as well. 

IT HAS A WATER MILL... can this place get any CUTER???!?!?!?!?!?

I didn't take the picture crookedly, those steps were really like that! :)

Can you see the little chapel in top? ^

It's a wee-door!! 

Now that I've either completely blown you away or put you to sleep with the nature and cute little village, here are all the photos of the CASTLE that was also in Monschau... Oh, "..castle?" you say?? YES THERE WAS A CASTLE. You could basically climb in, around, on, and all through the castle too (including several sketchy staircases). It was really, really awesome. I can't wait until the weather warms up for good, and the flowers start blooming. But as Kamila said (and our grey skies proved), you don't need beautiful weather to enjoy this beautiful place.